Silicon Valley Bank and your life savings

If you have worked hard and saved money all your life you may have over $250,000 in a bank. Or, maybe one of these days you might if you keep working and saving.

Glenn Mollette Guest Editorial

You most likely know that only $250,000 of your money is federally insured. In other words, if your bank fails you might lose any amount above $250,000. Let’s say you have one half million in your bank. The assets of the bank would eventually be liquidated. If enough money was collected you might receive the rest of your half million or you might never see a penny above the federally insured amount unless you are in Silicon Valley.

The second largest bank failure in U.S. history occurred March 10, in Santa Clara, California. The Silicon Valley Bank failed after a bank run on its deposits. The Department of Financial Protection and Innovation revoked its charter and transferred the business into receivership under the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

SVB is the country’s 16th largest bank, with $209 billion in assets and more than $175 billion in deposits.

A number of businesses had millions of dollars in the bank.

Roku had just under $500 million of its $1.9 billion dollars of cash assets in the bank.

Roblox, a video game company said 5 percent of its $3 billion in cash was held at SVB.

Toronto-based AcuityAds Holding had $55 million (U.S.) in SVB, and just $4.8 million (U.S.) elsewhere. That means more than 90 percent of the company’s deposits were held in SVB.

Aerospace manufacturer Rocket Lab held almost 8 percent, or approximately $38 million, of its total cash at the collapsed bank, it said in a recent Friday filing.

‘Crytpo’ lender BlockFi, which filed for bankruptcy in November, disclosed it held $227 million with SVB in a bankruptcy filing last Friday. BlockFi said in November it had halted withdrawals after facing “significant exposure” to Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange, as well as its sister hedge fund, Alameda.

BlockFi’s money in SVB is not FDIC-insured because it was in a money market mutual fund, the company learned from its bankruptcy trustee early this week. (Source – CNN. com) Move the calendar as did diseases we didn’t even know existed then. I mean, cancer, diabetes, heart attacks, strokes? Those things happened to other people, not us, right? I mean, WE were invincible! We thought we were going to live forever. Turns out, God had other plans for all of us. Some of us stuck around, some of us didn’t get to. That’s life, I guess. Who knew?

Anyway, I ran across this little snippet from an old column from another newspaper I wrote for back in the day. It best describes how I feel sometimes about how things in the world look today to my rapidly-aging self. It comes from author Stephen King’s novella, “The Body,” from which they made the movie, “Stand by Me.”

This phrase really spoke to me when I first read it and it speaks to me still. Maybe it might help someone through occasional tough times like it does me, especially when I think about how life deals with us, in general.

At the end of the story, King’s character/narrator wrote, “I never had any friends later on, like the ones I had when I was twelve… Jesus… does anyone?”

We all have friends today, but not like the ones we had then. After all, what makes a true friend?

I pray you have true friends. If you do, treasure them and tell them so.

You won’t regret it…